From the Vault: "The Lady in the Lake"

With two major exceptions, I am not a big fan of the American hard-boiled PI novel. Those two exceptions, however, are Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the two authors who really developed the rules of that game through their work in the "pulps," the magazines which specialized in such stories. I've reviewed their work from time to time on the Classic Mysteries podcast as well as on this blog. Here's what I had to say several years ago about one of Raymond Chandler's best books: The Lady in the Lake:

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Let’s take a walk together through some of the streets in Los Angeles and the towns near San Bernardino. We’re back in the 1940s, now. America’s at war. You’re a private detective, hired to find some guy’s missing wife. But it’s pretty clear that things are not always what they seem to be. You keep running into dead ends, into people who don’t want to talk to you, into police officers who are downright hostile. And you keep tripping over dead bodies. What a way to make a living. But that’s pretty much what happens to Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake.

When we talk about the American private eye story, we keep coming back to the names of two authors: Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Hammett was there first, with characters such as Sam Spade and the Continental Op working the streets of San Francisco. But Chandler took the private eye farther along the path that led away from the traditional, Golden Age amateur detectives and into a gritty world where people he would have said were more realistic committed crimes – some big, some small, most pretty ugly. But as his detective Philip Marlowe worked the area around Los Angeles, Chandler turned out some amazing and memorable stories. His first novel, The Big Sleep, remains one of the absolute classics in the field, a book so complex that even its author admitted he had no idea who committed one of the murders in the story.

There are plenty of murders in The Lady in the Lake, too. This one was published in 1943, and it is probably the closest Chandler ever came to a traditional, fairly-clued detective story. It’s not just a straightforward Marlowe-against-the-bad-guys story – there are a lot of surprises in store for the reader, as the plot twists and turns on its way to a surprise conclusion.

Let me set the scene: the book begins with Marlowe being hired to find Crystal Kingsley, the missing wife of a Los Angeles-area businessman. Marlowe starts asking questions – and provokes some very strange reactions. He quickly meets another man whose wife has also disappeared – and the two of them discover the body of a woman in a nearby lake. Is it one of the missing women? Perhaps. But as Marlowe continues his questioning and probing, more people turn up dead. And he runs into serious trouble from what could be some corrupt cops in a small town outside Los Angeles. Perhaps not surprisingly, in a hard-boiled mystery like this, he frequently runs into serious danger, he’s arrested a couple of times – and, throughout, he finds that what seem to be unconnected clues and conversations, disappearances and stories of old murders, all come together in strange and unpredictable ways.

And throughout the story, we have Chandler’s marvelous writing. Let me give you a few short examples. The story is told in the first person by Marlowe himself, and Chandler makes him pretty bitter about the events which are going on around him. At one point – having just discovered another body – Marlowe leaves the house where he found the victim, hoping to get answers to some more questions before he calls the cops to report the murder. And, as the narrator, he treats us to this insight:

Everything was quiet and sunny and calm. No cause for excitement whatever. It’s only Marlowe, finding another body. He does it rather well by now. Murder-a-day Marlowe, they call him. They have the meat wagon following him around to follow up on the business he finds.

That’s pretty typical. Chandler was a fine writer. Another example, where Marlowe describes for the reader one of the characters he’s trying to question:

Six feet of a standard type of homewrecker. Arms to hold you close and all his brains in his face.

Tells you just about everything you need to know, doesn’t it? Or this marvelous description of a cheap restaurant meal:

I gobbled what they called the regular dinner, drank a brandy to sit on its chest and hold it down, and went out on to the main street.

One more wonderful image:

 “I went back along the silent hallway. The self-operating elevator was carpeted in red plush. It had an elderly perfume in it, like three widows drinking tea.”

The bottom line, really, is that Raymond Chandler was a skilled, careful and gifted writer. If the hardboiled detective story has any claim to be called literature, and I would argue that it does, it is because of writers like Chandler, who created believable characters and put them into situations that ring true to us. In Chandler, as in Hammett before him, you had a specialized take on the Golden Age detective story – one that a lot of people found rang truer, at least to an American audience, than the sometimes artificial worlds created in the traditional mystery. If you enjoy that kind of story and that kind of world – and I do – then you’re likely to enjoy Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake. It’s a riveting book, one I found almost impossible to put down.

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You can listen to the original audio review by clicking here.

Next: His Burial Too, by Catherine Aird.

Comments

[Jennifer Jerry]

I must say Lady in the Lake is the best novel which I have read yet. It is a detective novel with Mystery/Crime. I have read it a few months back and really liked this. Now, I am thinking to buy few more novels to read before going on the https://www.goldenbustours.com/countdown-tours-new-year/